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Reports and compliance

Asking for a purchase, contract rates and what other hotels pay

The front of the buying chain: a store asks, somebody approves, and only then is a purchase order raised — at the vendor's contracted rate. Beside it: the rate cards, the price variance, what the same item costs at every hotel, and the MSME clock.

Menu → Purchasing. The chain from a purchase order onwards — order, goods received, vendor bill, match, payment — was already built. What was missing was the front of it: who asked, and who agreed, before anything was ordered.

Requisitions: what was asked for, by whom, for which department, and where each one has got to.
Requisitions: what was asked for, by whom, for which department, and where each one has got to.

Do this

  1. Ask for a purchase — the item and quantity, when it is needed, the department and cost centre it is for, and why. The estimate fills itself from the preferred vendor's contract rate, or the item's last cost.
  2. Save as a draft or submit it. Approval is the account's own rule where one exists (an amount threshold, levels, on the Approvals screen); otherwise a manager or above who is not the person who asked.
  3. Order it turns an approved requisition into a purchase order at the contracted rate, and links the two. A purchase order raised without a requisition still works — the report simply says which had none.

The rate card, and paying more than it says

Rate cards hold a vendor's agreed price for an item, with its dates, a minimum quantity and the contract reference. Two checks read them: a purchase order line above the contract rate, and a goods-received line above the purchase order. Both are listed rather than blocked — the buyer may have had a reason, and the report is where it gets asked about.

What the other hotels pay

The benchmark: the same item across the group's stores, the median, and who is above it.
The benchmark: the same item across the group's stores, the median, and who is above it.

The same rice is bought at four hotels under four item codes. The benchmark matches by name, reads the goods received in the period, and gives the average rate per base unit at each store, the group's median, the variance and the vendor who sold it. It is the answer to "are we buying well", which no single hotel's own stock report can give.

MSME & central is the clock: bills of vendors registered as micro or small enterprises that are approaching, or past, the days the law allows — where paying late costs interest, not goodwill.

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